Today there are many innovative technologies that can help people organize their work right on their computers. Some of these technologies include Evernote, Zotero, and OneNote. All of these technologies work well to organize work as well as sources for projects and other important information. Collectively these programs may work very well to keep a personal knowledge base containing information from multiple sources on multiple ideas.
Evernote is a program focused on helping to organize notes and articles for whatever purpose a person needs it. In my case this meant organizing all my notes for my psychology, nutrition, and education classes. Within these notebooks, I kept tabs on each entry identifying which exam it was on and relationships it may have to other work. I found this program very useful because rather than having various word documents, my work is kept all in the same place for me to access from any location. That brings me to another benefit of Evernote, it is accessible on multiple devices. Whenever I had a psychology quiz, rather than bringing my computer to recitation to study, I was able to look at my notes on my phone and edit them if I needed to add any new information. Evernote helps to set one up for productivity which is why it is a great program.
Zotero is an organizational program which focuses on collecting sources. This program can be very useful when compiling a bibliography for a project or even taking note of interesting articles in an online newspaper. Although this is true, I found this method of resource keeping somewhat confusing and chose not to use it. In some cases I could the button which added a source to my Zotero database did not appear and I could not figure out the proper way to add a source to Zotero by hand. In the end I decided that I would rather create bibliographies and work cited pages by hand because in doing that I used a book from my writing class and knew exactly what to put for each source. This is as opposed to when I had to try to find the elements asked for by Zotero and I did not know which were necessary and which were not. Although Zotero did not work well for me, it may be a very useful resource for someone who would has time to learn how it works and in that case it may be very beneficial in keeping a personal knowledge base.
Finally, I recently discovered a program on my computer called OneNote. This program is very similar to Evernote with a few other benefits. OneNote is a note collection program provided with the purchase of Microsoft Office. With this program, one may organize information in ways very similar to those of Evernote. Although I have not been using this program very long, I really like it because not only can you collect notes in a notebook adding in separate section for different topics and individual pages within that, you can also upload other documents. With this ability one may use OneNote to make notes on a document, image, or article whichever has been uploaded. I found this very useful when trying to highlight a digital article for Jumpstart and would imagine it would be useful in the case of other works too. Additionally, because OneNote is a Microsoft program, the format of the program itself is very familiar to me and would be to others who looked to use it.
Overall, I really like the program OneNote and may switch to it from Evernote and test it out next semester. I figure that I should try out multiple programs which work to collect information before settling down to use just one. Maybe I will even give Zotero another try too because it could come in handy when creating source pages for projects. I think that over winter break, I will look more into these programs to find which will work best for me and recommend that others do the same. Having a personal knowledge base is very beneficial to students who want to keep work organized and do not want to throw away a notebook full of knowledge at the end of the semester.
Evernote is a program focused on helping to organize notes and articles for whatever purpose a person needs it. In my case this meant organizing all my notes for my psychology, nutrition, and education classes. Within these notebooks, I kept tabs on each entry identifying which exam it was on and relationships it may have to other work. I found this program very useful because rather than having various word documents, my work is kept all in the same place for me to access from any location. That brings me to another benefit of Evernote, it is accessible on multiple devices. Whenever I had a psychology quiz, rather than bringing my computer to recitation to study, I was able to look at my notes on my phone and edit them if I needed to add any new information. Evernote helps to set one up for productivity which is why it is a great program.
Zotero is an organizational program which focuses on collecting sources. This program can be very useful when compiling a bibliography for a project or even taking note of interesting articles in an online newspaper. Although this is true, I found this method of resource keeping somewhat confusing and chose not to use it. In some cases I could the button which added a source to my Zotero database did not appear and I could not figure out the proper way to add a source to Zotero by hand. In the end I decided that I would rather create bibliographies and work cited pages by hand because in doing that I used a book from my writing class and knew exactly what to put for each source. This is as opposed to when I had to try to find the elements asked for by Zotero and I did not know which were necessary and which were not. Although Zotero did not work well for me, it may be a very useful resource for someone who would has time to learn how it works and in that case it may be very beneficial in keeping a personal knowledge base.
Finally, I recently discovered a program on my computer called OneNote. This program is very similar to Evernote with a few other benefits. OneNote is a note collection program provided with the purchase of Microsoft Office. With this program, one may organize information in ways very similar to those of Evernote. Although I have not been using this program very long, I really like it because not only can you collect notes in a notebook adding in separate section for different topics and individual pages within that, you can also upload other documents. With this ability one may use OneNote to make notes on a document, image, or article whichever has been uploaded. I found this very useful when trying to highlight a digital article for Jumpstart and would imagine it would be useful in the case of other works too. Additionally, because OneNote is a Microsoft program, the format of the program itself is very familiar to me and would be to others who looked to use it.
Overall, I really like the program OneNote and may switch to it from Evernote and test it out next semester. I figure that I should try out multiple programs which work to collect information before settling down to use just one. Maybe I will even give Zotero another try too because it could come in handy when creating source pages for projects. I think that over winter break, I will look more into these programs to find which will work best for me and recommend that others do the same. Having a personal knowledge base is very beneficial to students who want to keep work organized and do not want to throw away a notebook full of knowledge at the end of the semester.